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Ballmer Says 90% of Chinese Users Pirate Software
jbrodkin writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the official state visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao as an opportunity to complain that 90% of Microsoft software users in China didn't pay for the products. The comments were part of a discussion with Barack Obama and the Chinese president about intellectual property protection. According to a White House transcript, Obama said in a press conference that 'we were just in a meeting with business leaders, and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft pointed out that their estimate is that only 1 customer in every 10 of their products is actually paying for it in China.' Obama didn't detail any specific measures the US and China would take to help Microsoft and other vendors fighting software piracy. 'The Chinese government has, to its credit, taken steps to better enforce intellectual property,' Obama said. 'We've got further agreement as a consequence of this state visit. And I think President Hu would acknowledge that more needs to be done.' Microsoft did not say how it calculated the statistic that 90% of Chinese users aren't paying for Microsoft software."
AN OPEN LETTER TO CHINA
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to CHINA
To me, the most critical thing in the CHINA market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a CHINESE computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the CHINA market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the CHINA market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to CHINA makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of CHINESE must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What CHINESE can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in CHINESE software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to CHINA. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on CHINESE software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give CHINA a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the CHINA market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
John
Ballmer: Goddam it Hu, (Throws chair) 90% of the Chinese people are pirating software.
Hu: Yes, and you see where the problem is, they are using Windows to do it.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Party beliefs are that property is that of the people, really you should only have to buy one copy for all of China, in this case I think they've overpaid, but that could be said for anyone that pays the Micro$oft tax.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Maybe if a single copy of Windows didn't cost an entire month's wages for 90% of Chinese software users they wouldn't pirate it so much.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I suspect this would come from Windows Update (which is enabled by default, remember).
I'm your citation.
As someone who's been to Shanghai for the past 6 years and walked the streets, I'd say it's more than 90% in the public market (mainly on whiteboxes) than an international business working inside china. Not sure about the offices of local Chinese companies however. But wouldn't be surprised to find pirated copies in user share folders too.
Seriously, you can find a pleathora of XP, MS Office, and Adobe Suite software on a corner street market. Not to mention the un-godly amount of ripped DVD movies and Telesyncs. Some will even sell you entire portable HDDs full of the stuff.
Life is not for the lazy.
We compete with people who pay lower costs (legally) for everything from software to medicine.
Then on top of that, 90% pirate.
Good lord, no wonder the jobs are going over there. We should fine the hell out of any company selling products in the U.S. which were made by people using pirated software. But we keep those fines for U.S. countries and citizens while giving China a free ride.
This ends one way.. but it will probably take a few more years to play out.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I have been to the crowded Chinese technology markets. They are fantastic places; it feels like Blade Runner or something else out of a Dick novel. Food stalls, people selling every kind of hardware (except the newest), all software everywhere (a lot in English, but most in Chinese), people of every variety (I, a big blond guy, didn't stand out much. If I had hunched over and worn a coat, most people wouldn't have noticed me.), and a variety of tongues. In the hinterland, the best spoken English I found was in the computer markets.
But if 10% of the non-Chinese produced software being sold was legal, then I am a fool who knows nothing about computers. I would say that number suggested by Ballmer should be far closer to 100%. There was nothing legal being sold in the computer markets, malls, or anything else I saw selling Microsoft products.
Oh yeah, the place is infested with computer viruses as well. There's no kind of virus like a Chinese virus that western produced AV products don't recognize. If you're going to do business in China, you should do it with a Linux based OS.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
It's also worth mentioning that most of the pirated software found in China is sold laced with malware. Given all the SPAM and crap coming from that nation, I'd be curious to know the percentage of machine running pirated software constitute being the problem here.
Life is not for the lazy.
Rather than convince its citizens to send billions of Yuan to a US company, maybe the Chinese government would be better served to promote FOSS solutions like (Linux + Openoffice come to mind immediately but I'm sure there are other free/cheap office suites)
If I were an official in the Chinese government, I'd trust a Chinese forked Redhat distribution combed by loyal Chinese developers a lot more than a closed source operating system from a large US company to keep my secrets safe -- there's no telling what backdoors the US goverment asked MS to embed.
The last time they made this claim, they just assumed that every computer sold without an OS, sold with FreeDOS, or sold with Linux installed was sold to someone pirating Windows.
This claim is silly of course.
For example, with computers sold to companies, whatever OS is on the disk is usually replaced by a volume-licensed copy of some version of WIndows. Many companies, therefore, will buy these computers with no OS or FreeDOS loaded in order to lower the per-workstation cost.
I'm sure there are actually a bunch of individuals who are installing pirated copies of WIndows.or other Microsoft software, but simply counting the number of computers sold with no OS or with FreeDOS assumes an awful lot.
My blog
I visited MS campus about 15 years ago and at the time they were fond of claiming that the Chinese government was actively pirating MS software for distribution and resale. They even went so far as to say that they owned the equipment necessary to duplicate their holographic license stickers to produce physical pirated copies for resale outside the country.
Dear Mr. Ballmer
We openly admit that it is common practice in this country not to pay MicroSoft's predatory pricing if another avenue presents itself. However, we'd like to assure you that we're getting tired of the damned bluescreens, the most annoying of which occurred at the Beijing Olympics, right in front of God and everybody, if we believed in God, and we have decided to return all of our bootleg copies and what few legitimate copies we could scrape together. The crates should be arriving soon. We will be switching to Linux. We wish your company good fortune and hope you sell many more copies of Windows to the US military.
Regards,
China
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What made you think you would be getting a cut?
Bill Gates, 1998: "About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-212942.html
Bill Gates, 2007: "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article2098235.ece
Steve Ballmer, 2001: "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."
"Microsoft CEO takes launch break with the Sun-Times" (1 June 2001) Chicago Sun Times
Barack Obama, 2011: "So we were just in a meeting with business leaders, and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft pointed out that their estimate is that only one customer in every 10 of their products is actually paying for it in China. And so can we get better enforcement, since that is an area where America excels -- intellectual property and high-value added products and services."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/19/press-conference-president-obama-and-president-hu-peoples-republic-china
The numbers, 2009: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/software-piracy-in-china/
Microsoft wants hegemony in China over free (and freedom-respecting) options like GNU/Linux. It has always viewed piracy as a way to achieve this goal, but it doesn't have any real plan to turn those pirated copies of Windows and MS Office into revenue. Are they changing strategies and trying to muscle China now? Or is the U.S. gov't playing hardball for its own reasons? Or is it all just bullshit sabre-rattling? A real crackdown on Windows bootlegging would almost certainly make GNU/Linux the dominant platform in China. Parts of the Chinese gov't have pushed the Red Flag Linux distro in the past (specifically to avoid Windows licensing costs in Internet cafes), and there has been plenty of talk about the arrogance of Microsoft and the West, along with fears of potential backdoors in Windows. I'm sure the Chinese would prefer to be distributing a homegrown distro rather than having to pay up when Microsoft and the U.S. gov't come to collect.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
but I still wouldn't the OS after that.
Not even accidentally?
In fact Hu has three official titles:
General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (since 2002)
President of the People's Republic of China (since 2003)
Chairman of the Central Military Commission (since 2004)
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Living in China I saw Re Flag Linux running once. Yes, I was looking for it, and had been looking for it for over two years. It was on a machine in a shop in Xian. I was playing with it a little and a sales man came over. I commented that this was the first computer I had seen running Red Flag.
The first thing he said was, "don't worry, if you buy the computer we will take that off and put Windows on it."
One problem with Linux in China is that the universities use a program called Ruijie Supplicant for authentication in order to access the network and internet. The Linux client does not work and has never worked (OK, there is one person that claims to have gotten it working, I tried copying his process and it didn't work for me or for the campus IT staff).
The internet is the killer app (not really an app, I know) for personal computers. If it can not be used to connect to the internet, it has no future in China.
I will also add that I consider the 90% number t be suspect. I do not believe that 10% are using fully licensed software. I base this on having lived in China since 2006.
99% of Americans in Iraq are involved in stealing oil and illegal war... What is Ballmers opinion about that?
Didn't you hear? They fixed that. Americans returning from Iraq are now given a pat-down by the TSA to check for any stolen oil drums they might have hidden under their cloths. The problem has almost vanished!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Windows, and MS applications, could be a lot harder to pirate than they are.
They are not, because Microsoft would rather have infringing users of MS software, rather than have those users migrate to non-MS software. An infringing MS desktop is still an MS desktop, and MS can count it among their installed base, which works in their favor in all situations when someone makes a pro-MS argument based on installed base.
They even let infringing users keep Windows dynamically up to date!
You can't hold the view that all users are welcome, infringing or not, and then at the same time complain about a large nonpaying fraction of your user base.
Maybe their unwillingness to bow to the ridiculous "intellectual property" of the West is part of the reason they're doing so well.
And maybe it's something we could learn from. Apparently, putting corporate profits ahead of everything else may not be the only successful approach.
You could say that without the profit motive, we'd never get any decent operating systems, and to that I would answer "Ubuntu".
You are welcome on my lawn.
In the form of other parts of government "borrowing" from Social Security. Remember Al Gore and his lockbox? It was a way to tell us we were getting robbed by the financial elite (and to put an end to it)... too bad that guy never took office, eh?
Too bad our senior citizens are all hyped up about "austerity" and "deficit reduction" when the reality is that our debt is owed mostly to them.
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